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Monday, November 25, 2013

365 Poems: A night in Paris

How very strange. Showing Julian Paris pictures then thinking about that day in the city and suddenly everything's Paris Paris Paris.

Like this appeared in Feedly,so very sad, so very strange, I rather think there were suicides in Montparnasse:

Montparnasse
by Ernest Hemingway
There are never any suicides in the quarter among people one knows

No successful suicides.

A Chinese boy kills himself and is dead.
(they continue to place his mail in the letter rack at the Dome)

A Norwegian boy kills himself and is dead.
(no one knows where the other Norwegian boy has gone)

They find a model dead
alone in bed and very dead.
(it made almost unbearable trouble for the concierge)

Sweet oil, the white of eggs, mustard and water, soap suds
and stomach pumps rescue the people one knows.

Every afternoon the people one knows can be found at the café.

And then found this list of the top sites that helps the jumble of stuff we saw making some sense. Because while it's easy to tell the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame apart it's a little harder to keep Hôtel des Invalides and Petit Palais straight.

And read a pretty bad series of books which I will keep anonymous but they were partially set in Paris so, hard to resist.

Stop the bus, I need to get off.

But what does one take away from a day, a short, short day, in Paris? The familiarity. The sudden reality. The way the sun-and-clouds of the day sometimes made the city look black-and-white, or gray-and-white; the whiteness and the uniformity of the architecture. The square trees in the parks. The Eiffel Tower appearing and disappearing at the tour bus wound its way around the route. Bridges over the Seine. Boats on the Seine. The bridge with the locks. The Pyramid at the Louvre, for real. Notre Dame, for real. Arc de Triumph, for real. Riding down the Champs-Elysees and wanting nothing more than to jump out of the stupid slow tour bus and walk away. Maybe I did and I'm at one of those cafes, right now.

And finally, this. Life Magazine, always the best photography, 1946. Paris Unadorned. Coolest part? Not that different now.